On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 06:07:53PM -0700, Christopher Samuel wrote:
> 
> On 14/08/13 02:59, Andy Wettstein wrote:
> 
> > If proctrack/cgroup is not being used, I don't think it is possible
> > to properly track a process that does this. Since proctrack/cgroup
> > can reliably track all PIDs for a step, then I think it should be
> > able to track this.
> 
> As I understand it Moe was saying that jobacct_gather/cgroup is buggy,
> not proctrack/cgroup.   We are using proctrack/cgroup here in
> production on our x86 system that just went live and it seems to be
> working so far (no users have screamed yet).

Right, I am using proctrack/cgroup and jobacct_gather/linux. The issue
is that proctrack/cgroup knows all the PIDs for a job, but
jobacct_gather/linux doesn't use the PIDs available from
proctrack/cgroup to gather the job information. It tries to walk the
process tree, which at least fails if a process in the job has its
parent PID set to 1 (there may be other instances where that fails). My
statement above is that if proctrack/cgroup is not being used, it would
likely be impossible for jobacct_gather/linux to track those processes,
but with proctrack/cgroup is should be possible for jobacct_gather/linux
to track those. Maybe that was a little ambiguous in my wording.

> 
> We did try jobacct_gather/cgroup but as Danny and Moe said it doesn't
> collect information, possibly (as Ralph postulated in a thread I
> started) because of confusion over signed/unsigned values (I was
> seeing negative values of memory use reported for some cases).
> 
> All the best,
> Chris
> -- 
>  Christopher Samuel        Senior Systems Administrator
>  VLSCI - Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative
>  Email: [email protected] Phone: +61 (0)3 903 55545
>  http://www.vlsci.org.au/      http://twitter.com/vlsci
> 

-- 
andy wettstein
hpc system administrator
research computing center
university of chicago
773.702.1104

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